It All Started When Google Became A ‘Verb’

Courtesy of Automotive Digest – Until search engines like Google came on the scene, the Internet was a chaotic place with eight billion pages filed in random order and no index. Since there is no way to alphabetize the Internet like a phone book, Google set out to organize the world’s information on the web. Their organization progress has been remarkable, but not the real key to Google’s success.

What makes Google, Yahoo! and MSN viable is relevance — the ability to sort through those eight billion pages, plus all of the new ones added each day, and quickly deliver the page most relevant to the searched terms. That’s a much more difficult task than simply indexing them.

Google began asking the people who put pages on the Internet to describe what they were about, and the Meta Tag was born. That is the little bit of code on a Web page that nobody except a search engine ever sees.

Using Meta Tags, the Web builder could tell a search engine which inquiries their page was relevant to. It worked like a charm, until marketers figured out that salting Web pages with Meta Tags, mirroring words commonly used in inquiries, would drive traffic to their sites.

And they did, so the race was on for Google to redefine relevance.

Next, the search engines began looking into the content of Websites to find relevant information. And marketers started using high frequency search words in their copy.

The search engines again shifted gears and started evaluating Websites based on how they were linked to other Websites. Marketers responded with hundreds of dummy Websites that existed only to link with their real pages and drive traffic to them.

Now, Google and some of the other search engines are starting to look at what people are saying about a Website as a way to determine its relevance. And the marketers are beginning to catch on to that ploy, too.